When 17-year-old Matt Willner fueled up his 1999 Volkswagen Beetle, purchased from eBay, he quickly realized that peeling potatoes, not rubber, was the way of his future.

"The engine starts on diesel fuel, heats up the veggie fuel for about 10 minutes until I hit a switch, and it starts running off straight vegetable oil," Willner explains of his car, which operates on a Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems conversion kit designed for diesel engines. Willner purchased his car with the kit already in place, but these $800 to $1,100 systems can be installed at home, or by a Greasecar-certified mechanic listed by area at http://www.greasecar.com/resources.cfm. Depending on the mechanic, installations will run from $500 to $850 for cars and $850 to $1,200 for trucks.

Considering our planet's dwindling, non-renewable oil reserves, Greasecar kits, and others like it, are worth investigating. Willner refills his petroleum tank less than once a month, and his vegetable oil comes from the Dwight-Englewood School cafeteria in Englewood, New Jersey, which supplies renewable reserves of used oil for free. Good for the earth, good for the wallet. In fact, since he bought the car last September, he says his total fuel costs have been "a bit less than a hundred dollars."

Greasecar's Michael Garjian says that using straight vegetable oil for fuel can lower greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 100 percent, greatly reducing air pollution. And, he adds, "It's carbon neutral. When you burn vegetable oil, the gas contains carbon dioxide, but it's the same carbon dioxide...that was absorbed by the plant while it was growing."

(from dori's link)

Interesting! This would be a good way to use up all that "trans-fat" oil the restaurants are going to have to throw out eventually, too.

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